Stop Bringing Your Phone Into the Bathroom

A very simple new year's resolution that will change your life immediately.

There is a genre of book that has been lost to time: the toilet read.

Once, these books were everywhere, perched precariously atop the toilet tank, wedged between cleaning products, or piled in magazine racks that seemed like relics even when they were new. There were guidebooks to random parts of America (1,001 Roadside Attractions), books full of bad jokes and puns (Truly Tasteless Jokes), and collections of trivia that felt delightfully useless (Guinness World Records 2005). There were magazines, too: Reader’s Digest, Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan.

But toilet reads weren’t just mass-market ephemera. There was the novel you couldn’t put down, the self-help book your mom got you for Christmas, or the poetry collection you’d flip through while avoiding more serious business. If all else failed, you’d scan the back of a shampoo bottle or the ingredients on a tube of toothpaste. Reading, no matter how banal, occupied the mind while the body did its work.

Today, people don’t read on the toilet anymore. We scroll. We watch. We spend far more time in the bathroom than we need to, hypnotized by the endless vortex of Instagram reels, TikToks, and the bleak churn of doomscrolling. The phone has replaced the toilet read, and something essential has been lost in the exchange.

Smartphones slipped into our lives as companions, promising to make everything more convenient. And they did. It’s undeniably easier to reach for a device that contains every book, article, and video imaginable than to keep a stack of magazines in the bathroom. But what started as convenience has turned into captivity. The phone doesn’t just accompany us; it insists on our attention, even in moments that should be private, reflective, or fleeting.

In the bathroom, this insistence feels particularly absurd. You enter with a purpose, but that purpose is quickly forgotten. You find yourself squatting on the toilet, scrolling through videos of dogs learning to skateboard or celebrity divorces you didn’t know were happening. Five minutes stretch into ten, then twenty. When you finally emerge, you feel dazed and overexposed. You weren’t present for any of it, not really.

And the consequences aren’t just metaphysical. Doctors warn about the physical toll of prolonged bathroom breaks—hemorrhoids from extended sitting, poor posture from hunching over your phone. The bathroom, once a space of relief, has become another site of distraction and overstimulation.

Scrolling in the bathroom might seem harmless—even necessary in a culture obsessed with multitasking. But it robs us of the quiet, reflective pause that old-fashioned toilet reads once provided. In fact, it robs us of the experience of being in one’s own bathroom at all.

Reading—even light, silly, or incidental reading—has a way of rooting us in the present. The heft of a magazine in your hands, the turning of a page, even the small pleasure of rereading the same chemical ingredient list for the hundredth time—these acts tether us to the material world. They remind us that not all discovery is curated, nor all pleasure chosen.

In contrast, scrolling feeds us endless content, yet it leaves us hollow. We scroll not to connect but to escape, not to enjoy but to numb. And when we’re done, we’re not sure what we’ve consumed, only that it wasn’t enough. The bathroom, once a quirky refuge, becomes just another venue for our disconnection.

But what if we declared the bathroom a phone-free zone? Not as an act of discipline, but as a small, deliberate rebellion against the tyranny of constant connection. A New Year’s resolution, yes, but also an invitation to recover something lost.

Start simple. Leave your phone on the counter or in another room. Replace it with something analog: a magazine, a slim novel, a poetry collection, or even a book of crossword puzzles. Let the bathroom become a sanctuary again, a place where time slows, where your mind can wander without the constant tug of notifications.

If reading feels too ambitious, let the space remain empty. Stare at the tiles, listen to the sound of the faucet dripping, let your thoughts unfurl in the quiet. There’s a reason so many ideas come to us in the shower. The bathroom, stripped of its screens, can become a crucible for creativity, a rare moment of peace in a chaotic world.

Of course, this resolution isn’t really about the bathroom. It’s about how we choose to spend our time and where we place our attention. The bathroom, strange and secret chamber that it is, offers a microcosm of our larger relationship with technology. If we can reclaim this one small space, perhaps we can begin to reclaim others: the dinner table, the waiting room, the walk to the corner store.

In the end, the phone will wait for you. Its feeds, its pings, its bright little world. But the bathroom deserves more. It deserves a book. Or nothing at all.